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How to encourage good gameplay
Now I know there are a lot of posts who complain about camping, tunneling, gen-rushing and other fancy stuff that ruins your day. Rescently some streamer have shown that Killers can get a lot MMR and "win" a lot by just playing as scummy as you can without perks or add-ons at all.
Now many people suggest a punishment for camping or tunneling.
I however want to rise the question if you can approach this the other way around: How would you reward Killers for playing more "fair" and less "scummy"?
I am not talking about BP or something like that. I am talking about a in-game mechanic that offers a benefit when you play in a certain way. BP do not mean anything because they are just a post game reward and offer no direct feedback when you are in the game.
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I think you would need to slow the entire game down at that point. The issue right now is that if you do not secure something as a Killer within a certain amount of time, you're done. On top of that, it can be pretty stressful, especially when a single Dead Hard H I T V A L I D A T I O N can cost you several hook states or the entire game. So you've a lot of choices to make, in a very short period of time and all of them matter a whole ton on top of spawn RNG, on top of not knowing whether or not you're playing against a premade. If there was a way to slow the game down, making each individual, split second decision matter less, I believe lot of those issues would be alleviated, as people wouldn't feel such strong incentive to play "scummy". Would it solve all the issues? Of course not, every game has those types of players, but DbD really, really rewards that Behaviour due to how the game's set up right now.
When it comes to a direct mechanic, you could experiment with making hooks tick faster when the Killer isn't around. Also, VHS has an interesting mechanic where if you don't down anyone after a certain amount of hits, your next attack will down a player. Sadly that would likely lead to people blaming their team even more than they already do, but I think something in that direction is also worth considering.
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Friendly ask for it in the loading screen and hope people play nice out of the good of their heart?
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Mechanical benefits are required to rebalance this game around lack of those strategies being used as strategies. Disclaimer, I don't have problems with them being used as strategies. But if you did want to rebalance the game around not needing those strategies, here's just some random brainstorming.
For instance, camping is done to maintain pressure around a specific area because it offers better pressure compared to going elsewhere. The risk is that the other survivors are not pressured, so they ignore you and do generators. So an example of a mechanical basekit buff could be something like if the killer leaves a 24m area of the hook, then for the next 30 seconds, generators not actively being repaired will regress at 0.5/s (current Ruin's rate), non-stacking with Ruin. This gives pressure options. You push someone else off a generator and it immediately starts tanking quickly. Or for example, amplifying gen regression to damaged generators within a certain radius of the hook, since another reason to camp is to defend certain specific generators by the hook. So on and so forth. Numbers are all just placeholders, but you get the idea.
Tunneling is done because it provides more pressure to either get someone to death hook early, or to get someone out of the game which provides massive pressure. The risk is that the other survivors are not pressured, so they ignore you and do generators. So for instance, a solution that would work for weaker killers but would likely need a different one for stronger killers, could be a basekit Make Your Choice of sorts with a shorter duration but less or no cooldown. Then the unhooker becomes vulnerable to being instantly downed, which provides a better incentive to chase the unhooker. And since Make Your Choice does require distancing from the hook, it would not work with camping. So on and so forth.
Slugging is done because it is a situation where it is better to take the risk to immediately chase another survivor for more pressure than to pick up and carry them and hook them, which can take a significant amount of time. Examples are people being downed on a pallet or in the open with people with flashlights nearby, multiple survivors in the area that you can hit and/or down quickly, so on and so forth. The risk is that they can pick the person back up and thus deny what would've been a hook state if you were able to pick up and hook them. I consider this the far least complainable comparatively of the three. Outside of slugging people to death, there are basically no issues with this gameplay-wise. Camping and tunneling have gameplay merits to exist as-is, but can often be used to just specifically harass a player for the sake of harassment itself. Furthermore, multiple killers are balanced around slugging as a core, which I do not consider problematic.
But yeah, hope that does give some food for thought, and many of these apply to weaker killers more specifically.
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Rescently some streamer have shown that Killers can get a lot MMR and "win" a lot by just playing as scummy as you can without perks or add-ons at all.
I however want to rise the question if you can approach this the other way around: How would you reward Killers for playing more "fair" and less "scummy"?
If anything, Otz's experiment shows exactly why you -don't- want to take this approach, from a balancing perspective. If Slugging, Tunnelling and Camping are that powerful as strategies, then trying to bring other strategies into competition with it would just mean skewing the winrate too harshly in the killer's favour.
Not to mention that if you do create some balancing paradigm where a 'clean' killer player can consistently get 2Ks with similar ease, you'd leave the game balance entirely in the killer's hands: You can either get a fair match, or the killer can just choose to employ one of the more powerful strategies and win with the same level of decisiveness that they currently can.
You can't make nice plays more effective than tunnelling, slugging and camping, because those three strategies are already too strong, so raising the floor to that level would just make the game impossible for survivors.
Camping, tunnelling and slugging -must- be addressed if this game wants to get out of this meta.
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Make survivors impossible to hook twice in a row.
And make insane balance changes to the game mechanics like smaller maps and much longer gen times.
So I will rather take scummy killers and not changing half of the game. Its not like its unplayable when killer tunnels
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Camping, tunnelling and slugging -must- be addressed if this game wants to get out of this meta.
You know that is not really easy to do, because you can't do this alone in one patch, right? You would also have address healing speed, gen speed, map sizes, spawns etc.
If you just nerfed killers, it would be ######### hell.
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Make survivors impossible to hook twice in a row.
That can't happen. Problem is that you would somehow also have to make it impossible for that survivor to annoy a killer when he is basically immortal at that moment. It's just DS on steroids.
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I wonder why you note slugging here. I agree with excessive slugging but some Killers like Oni, Myers and Plague are bound to slug because they have to make the most out of their power, their window of opportunity. If you punish slugging across the board these Killers will take an undeserved hit.
While I agree with the idea that it would bring unbalance to just reward that strategy more without doing something about the other, you miss the point in the other direction: If you just nerf this strategies without any benefit for the "fair" gameplay you will tilt the game towards survivors. It would result in unbalance as well.
There are already plenty of ideas about punishing Killers for bad gameplay. However you have to do both at the same time: Nerf one thing and buff the other.
I asked for a way to reward. You answere with a way to punish people for tunneling...whelp, okay.
The idea is to brainstorm and come up with good and constructive suggestions.
I agree and I think that these points are where the fixes should happen: Camping and tunneling both offer a benefit that can not be underestimated.
With one you shift the survivors priorities away: When they could have worked on multiple generators across the map and you had to search them, you can now force their hand. Even when I play fair I can see this advantage by using BBQ: When I see the survivors and I can see somebody going for the rescue with BBQ I will intercept them. This yields pretty good results even for fair play.
With the other you limit their rescource (time) by 1/4 when you are successful.
I think camping is the bigger issue by the way as with tunneling the survivor can at least move on and has some form of gameplay (the chase) where they can play and make decisions (as long as they are not facing Nurse). Sure it is bad but camping is worse.
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When otz say…
sucha obsession with him. He lives for dbd, he cant even eat a meal off stream. It made me sad that he literally has a dinner behind pc while showing on youtube some random dbd match just for some privacy.
And now he is a mentor to dbd newbies. Very nice. But it was funny, as he mentored a bubba on face camp
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Well I dont see anything else that wouldnt change the game completely.
Survivors have 3 lives, killers tunnel to make it 1v3 faster and have a better chance to win.
With all things considered, hooking someone 3x in a row is the best, most optimal play that killers can do.
And its not about scummy or unfun or whatever. Its simply the most logical thing to do for you to win in how game works.
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Funny is that it can be quite easily prevented by survivors, just don't unhook in first 5 seconds.... Protective hits are good too.
This is just problem to fix for multiple reasons.
It might be good to fix face-camping, but when all gens are done it's kinda only objective.
You also don't really want to affect proxy camping, because that's not really always killer's fault, sometimes survivors are just waiting there visible to you, or you have 3-gen in that area, why would you leave?
Players are already toxic, what do you think they would do if they knew you are not able to kill them by any means?
Fact is you just have to kill a survivor at some point if you want to have chance for 4k. Getting everyone to deadhook is just not really possible in most games.
Only issue is when killer decides to camp / tunnel from first hook and he has build for it, then you are kinda screwed.
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Only thing i can think of is give penalties to repair speed on survivors based on how often they been hooked but bonusses on repair speed based on dead survivors.
So it's more benificial to leave them alive then to kill them untill everyone is hooked a couple of times.
Probably wouldn't work well in practise
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Why do i get the feeling that the devs will surprise us with some kind of "punishmend" or new mechanic that aims at making the game harder for campers?
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I agree with basically everything you said.
But the OP is talking about encouraging going for different survivors all the time, and I simply dont see it possible in current game state.
Maybe in different game mode. Without hooks and health states as we know them now. Half of the perks are all around hooks on both sides.
What better reward would killer get than removing someone as fast as possible?
Theres nothing better to get than that imo
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You don't really have to do it.
I liked an idea of small pop like 5%, so you have reason to leave hooked survivor for gens.
Kicking is useless anyway without a perk for it, so why not make it better.
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I agree here. You had to wast a ton of time of the survivors to make any other play as good as tunneling.
Even when you intercept the survivor that goes for the rescue and you can occupy the time of 3 survivor (hooked, chased, rescuer) pretty good this is still worse when it comes to time efficiency than just tunneling one survivor out and cutting off 1/4 of their time for the rest of the game.
As such when punishing the Killer and taking tunneling away (say we have a magic fairy and can just wish for this) we would have to fix the gape between the ideal scenario of "3 survivor occupied" (hooked, chased, rescuer/healer) to "-1/4 of the time for the rest of the game".
While I think that generators are "too fast" sometimes, just making them slower would make survivors more miserable and thus just giving "penalty x per hook to genspeed" a bad idea.
Please do not get me wrong. My idea is not to make survivors weaker or punish them more. I just dislike the idea of punishing Killers for the same reason. If possible no role should become more miserable just to make the game more "balanced". People will play a fun and unbalanced game but not a balanced unfun game.
I also understand why you think this is pretty much impossible with the current version of the game. A seperate mode would help for sure.
This is why I think "Grim Embrace", "BBQ & Chilly", "Hex: Devour Hope" and even "Dying Light" are good choices per design: They give you a reward for leaving the hook and getting into a chase. However perks are only a supplement and should not replace basic gameplay mechanics.
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That's BS. I have under 30 ms ping, so it's survivor's internet...
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I agree with other people that have said to nerf camping/tunnelling, see where kill rates fall to, and then go in with various buffs to bring them back up (general buffs and buffs specific to the killer characters that struggle to perform). Mind you, I for one don't want to nerf those strategies "out of the game", just make them less effective. But if we don't change anything about them at all and instead just try to "encourage" players not to employ them, not only will players still employ them, but they may even collaterally benefit from those changes. And those strategies are not only undesirable to certain extents and therefore a game experience issue, they are also too effective in public matchmaking and therefore a live game balancing issue.
There are various things that can be done to alleviate the problems with those strategies. Remove hook grabs. Increase the invincibility duration for unhooked survivors (basekit BT). Basekit Kindred (perhaps without the killer aura). Basekit DS (disabled in the endgame). Have unhooked survivors be healthy. Use the cage mechanics of Pyramid Head to rework hooks, namely teleport the survivor to a different random hook location if the killer is within a certain range of the hook for a certain amount of time (wider range and shorter time than PH's cages though, because those can still easily be camped). Various killer-specific adjustments (think Leatherface). Hell, remove hook timers altogether.
Killer buffs to compensate would naturally revolve around other elements of the gameplay. Increased movement speeds. Increased base generator regression. Increased pallet break and window vault speeds. Maybe the ability to cancel and thereby fake pallet breaks and window vaults. Faster wall breaks, "bursting" through them. Basekit BBQ (no points, no range condition). Basekit Ruin (no Hex totem, .25 c/s regression, gens can still be kicked to increase that regression to .5c/s). Basekit NOED (Lethal Blinks and Grudge hits not counting as basic attacks). Basekit Pop (on the farthest-away gen from the hook that has progress, highlighted for the killer). "Early-game collapse" (block all generators until the first chase begins). Various killer-specific adjustments.
These just as assortments of random ideas.
One idea that actually does go the route of "encouragement" would be to apply repair speed debuffs whenever a killer is in a chase, and repair speed buffs whenever a killer is within a certain range of a hook. For the range, around 20-30m seems reasonable. The repair buffs would only start to apply 5-10 seconds after a respective hook has happened, to give the killer time to leave. If the killer is chasing a survivor within that range, the buff and debuff would cancel each other out. A debuff of 25% could be alright, making generators take 26.6 seconds longer to repair if the killer is chasing for the entire interaction. In order for the repair buff to cancel this out in cases where the killer is chasing survivors around the hook, the buff would have to be 33%. That translates to 20 seconds faster generators if the killer is camping for the entire interaction, which is good because at that point hook stage and generator align at 60 seconds.
A similar thing could be done to discourage tunnelling: Give an unhooked survivor a repair speed debuff until they are hooked again, but if the unhooked survivor is being chased and/or hooked again before any other survivor has been hooked, give all other survivors a repair speed buff for as long as that survivor is being chased/on the hook.
As for an idea that would actually get rid of camping/tunnelling/slugging altogether... Make the entity swallow up a survivor as soon as they go down, respawn them at a random location far away from the killer on the map in the healthy or injured state. On their third down, survivors get sacrificed instead of respawned. If you want to keep slugging in, make it so that the killer has to manually call upon the entity to swallow downed survivors. Obviously this would change a whole lot about the game and require a lot of other changes, but it would make for an a lot more chase-centric, low-downtime, action-packed gameplay flow for everyone involved. I doubt BHVR would ever do this because it changes too much about the character of the game, and there are legitimate arguments that it would lose some key qualities, such as the strategic elements of camping/tunnelling/slugging and their counterplay, as well as their "thrill" and "danger" factors of being capable of turning games around and/or ending them within a short period of time, but still, many people would regard this mode as superior and desirable, and it's technically easy to achieve.
A less extreme modification that would still do a lot to make the game less campy/tunnelly/sluggy would be to make it so that the killer wins automatically after getting X hooks. The exact amount of hooks could be unique for every killer, which would make balancing a lot easier too. So say a Nurse wins with 12 hooks, a Wraith with 8. There are no hook stages and survivors do not get sacrificed after 3 hooks either, rather all survivors get sacrificed after the respectively necessary amount of total hooks has been reached. In order to prevent the targeting of weak links, you could make it so that at least two survivors have to have been hooked in order to reach the goal. A tie would be if the killer gets half the amount of required hooks. Anything above or below that would count as a "soft" win for the respective side. If all survivors are hooked/slugged simultaneously, allow them to unhook themselves and pick themselves back up.
Again, just ideas to demonstrate that it isn't impossible or even difficult to fundamentally change these things.
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Kicking does have a use, but it does feel like it’s pointless if a survivor taps a gen shortly before you find them after kicking one in a jungle gym.
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A lot of it comes down to map design relative to game speed and how tile safety/tile count and map size scales upwards but gen speed remains static. There's a huge difference between playing for 12 hooks on Coal Tower vs Eyrie.
Survivors never have to consider resource management on larger maps if their team is focusing on generators. You can pre-drop everything and still only go through half the pallets on some of the more massive maps. The maps aren't designed to be optimized from a gameplay perspective.
Point being, a killer doesn't have many options on a huge map aside from playing around half the map and focusing on area control. It's not compelling. It's not exciting or engaging. But it's the only chance a killer has against anybody good.
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The devs have said they consider actual face camping an issue they want to find a way to mitigate but haven’t come up with an effective solution that doesn’t create other serious problems.
“Tunneling” isn’t even a well defined term let alone an issue that needs to be addressed. All the tunneling complaints I get in game boil down to me having downed someone more than once in a row or chasing someone after an unhook. It’s just sore losing far as I’m concerned at this point, I ignore any gripes about it.
”Camping” in general is likewise an illdefined term that seems to encompass totally legitimate zone defense. Again, I’ve had survivors make ridiculous claims about camping, including for instance ranting about me “camping the gens” once. I get why actual facecamping is something the devs are interested in discouraging, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with so called “proxy camping” which is just zone defense or patrolling an area.
Finally some people mentioned slugging, note that slugging is an intentional part of the game design. Some perks and killers are specifically made with the intent of leaving people on the ground while you chase others.
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If we were able to play this game without running any perks I wonder what would happen
Like if the Devs made a perkless mode or something
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You are playing online with real people - there will always and ever be idiots around no matter what you do.
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I think the 1st thing that needs to be addressed are the maps; balance and playstyles can be taken into consideration after that imo.
When I play a killer like nemesis or deathslingrr on Midwich I feel little reason to play scummy
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When I talk about "tunneling" I mean singling out the unhooked person straight off the hook and chasing them again, just to return once more when they are unhook to repeat it. Entering 3 chases with them without hooking anybody inbetween, even eating Deceisive Strike and pushing through Borrow Time.
When i talk about "camping" I mean just patroling around the hook and never leaving a proximity where something like "Make your choice" or "Hex: Devour Hope" could activate. Returning and checking while walking by or hanging somebody in a 3gen is not that much of an issue for me, this happens during the endgame and is a good strategy.
Slugging is no on the table for me. Some Killers need to do it (Oni, Plague) to get something out of their power. This should be the least issue to address.
With this point of "map design" I agree. If we look at Mt Ormound (Mt Palletmont for one of my friends) we see too many pallets with no need to safe them. There is no need to even save the shack pallet for later as you or your teammate are probably not going to return to this point. The problem does not even include "unsafe" pallets where you can make a play (even thou on low loops there is not much "play") but only safe pallets and structures...
I have no problem with big maps, I like them. I even like big indoor maps like RPD. But the amount of pallets should never be so high that you can loop a killer for 3 gens, wast every pallet without a single "play" and just predrop them and still leaving enough safety on the map for the rest of your team.
Okay, so we need to fix maps.
The problem would be, if you see Killrates fall you will also see a decrease in Killer players. You can not risc this blow to the playerbase of a single role as this would make either que times go through the roof or just make matchmaking an even bigger hell. This is why in my opinion you have to buff Killers when you nerf camping or tunneling. Many Killers player will lose their fun in the role when you take away only their tools and give them no compensation.
Your brainstormed suggestions are not bad but I would like to add that some of them seem quit abuseable, especialy the basekit BT and DS one. The increase speed also seems problematic because loop design is based around those values very much. A single tweak can ruin the entire game very quickly.
I do like the idea of giving the ability to "fake" vault and kicks and I support the removal of "hook grabs". We rarely seem them anyway unless a survivor is very stupid and in those cases they would go down to two basic attacks anyway.
But I would like to make another suggestion: If the Killer is within x meter from the hook for a certain amount of time and no survivor is within that perimeter than the hook breaks and the survivor on the hook becomes free with a long enduring status effect (think at least Borrow Time value, maybe even as high as 20-25 seconds). The timer put on a hold when another survivor enters the perimeter (no need to punish the Killer for teammate interduced camping). Just a quick brainstorm to address the issue.
As an encouragement I was also thinking about the ability to Mori a survivor when you were able to get 8 hooks, while 4 survivors are alive and the gates are powered. People love their Mori after all...
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You're right, while it would be the cleanest way to actually ship appropriately-compensatory buffs, those 4-6 weeks before any such buffs arrive would be fairly rough. I don't think it would be so rough to lastingly hurt the game, but I do agree that there should probably be some buffs packaged with the camp/tunnel nerfs from the get-go.
Fair on the unhook invincibility ("basekit BT") - I think it would be sensible to disable the unhooked survivor's collision for as long as the invincibility lasts, so as to ensure that they cannot bodyblock the killer. That said, bodyblocking the killer in these scenarios obviously comes at the risk of the killer chasing after that survivor instead, even waiting out the invincibility, and since not all of these things would necessarily be implemented together, the survivor would not necessarily have DS either. These are things to consider in the context of just how much one would want to get rid of tunnelling and the gameplay it entails on both sides. Although I agree that it probably is for the better to just have both basekit but disable the unhooked survivor's collision, ensuring the killer can freely chase after the unhooker.
The movement speed increase is indeed a big one. For one obvious thing, Bloodlust speeds would have to be adjusted to match. For another, there would definitely be a learning period of a couple of weeks for survivor players to get used to what these new movement speeds entail in chaseplay on the various tiles. That said, we already have things that increase the base movement speed of players on both sides (NOED, Hope, Play With Your Food, to name the more common ones), so it's not a completely foreign concept for players to be able to gauge distances and catch-up speeds based on different movement speeds (not least because there are 4.4 and 4.6m/s killers, of course). The exact speeds here would have to be experimented with, it would not necessarily have to be as significant as +0.2m/s across the board, but ultimately while the map and tile layout is designed with the current speeds in mind, we know that slightly increased speeds would not break the game, and it would obviously make killers much more threatening in chases.
Being able to fake pallet breaks and window vaults is something I've been wanting for years, as it would add another cool layer to the mindgames in chaseplay, and do so strictly benefitting killers of course. Killers that have to break pallets and vault windows are generally the weaker ones, so buffs to these aspects are particularly interesting as means of lifting those killers up without all too significantly affecting the stronger killers.
I wouldn't say hook grabs are rare, and in fact they are one of the mechanics that encourage hard-camping the most, since they allow killers to prevent hook trades that would otherwise regularly be guaranteed, and turn that into scenarios where they can quickly be put into winning positions just due to that. It can also be noted that survivors regularly do not even attempt to contest camped hooks merely due to the threat of hook grabs, so even if we were to only rarely see them, they would still be an impactful camping mechanic due to that deterring effect. Hook grabs are just a bad mechanic, they lead to awkward dancing around the hook with killers refusing to hit survivors and survivors scared to commit to unhooks, they revolve much more around luck than skill not least because they are affected by latency which can randomly screw over either side on grabs, and they have been bugged forever in that the hooked survivor cannot be unhooked by a third survivor for the entire duration of the grab animation. Removing them would already do a lot to combat camping gameplay, and notably, it would do so most of all for the least desirable forms of that gameplay (hard-camping).
Your two suggestions are also interesting. Giving the hooked survivor more agency in a camping scenario is a good idea, because one of the worst design aspects of camping gameplay is precisely the lack of agency of that hooked player. Not sure whether your suggestion as it is would do the trick, but it could, and I like the direction. The mori suggestion is also something I like. It would be a cool modifier for my "X amount of hooks = automatic sacrifice of entire team" format, because it means the game won't instantly be over, rather the killer will get a huge boost in the ability to end the game by being able to mori anyone they down on the spot, and in that format we would obviously always have 4 survivors still alive by that point. I don't know whether I would limit this to the endgame however. I do think killers should be put into a stronger position in endgame scenarios (basekit NOED (without the speed boost, with a global totem counter for survivors), gate switch progress regressing over time, BT/DS disabled in the endgame, ...), but I would like to see those moris become available earlier already. Obviously the mixing of various different changes is something one would have to experiment with altogether, we are of course just brainstorming here.
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Gen repair speed decreases as long as the Killer is chasing or carrying someone while someone else is hooked. Gen repair speed increases as long as the Killer is not doing that while someone is hooked.
Killer is rewarded for hunting other Survivors after hooking someone but punished for camping, and Survivors are incentivized to rescue someone in the meantime.
This is mostly just an idea off the top of my head.
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Gen repair speed decreases as long as the Killer is chasing or carrying someone while someone else is hooked
Actually not a bad idea, as it applies pressure & encourages Killers to find more targets, instead of a weak punishment Survivors can abuse.
Gen repair speed increases as long as the Killer is not doing that while someone is hooked.
So, until the Killer FINDS someone; Survivors get a bonus to gen repair speeds. This would massively punish low-mobility Killers.
And that's on top of skillchecks & toolkits & BNPs. On top of that; this encourages Survivors to avoid the Killer & NOT rescue someone, as they are getting a repair bonus.
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Just gotta create a buffer time before the penalty kicks in, similar to how there's a buffer time before the Killer's emblem score starts getting penalized for being too close to the hook. Also create a buffer time between when the Killer downs someone and when they pick up someone.
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